


It Remembers

by SMJB



Category: Original Work
Genre: Creepypasta, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:00:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21574123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SMJB/pseuds/SMJB
Summary: A young man gives a pair of ghost hunters a tour of his family estate, and of the sins his bloodline cannot escape.





	It Remembers

It seems that "ghost hunters" and "paranormal researchers" are a dime a dozen these days--and worth maybe half that--but all the same, I sit up and pay attention when they start disappearing.

Ed Norrys and Bill Brinton were film students at Barnard College in New York City. They met their freshman year as dorm-mates and quickly became fast friends; both had dreams of making it big in Hollywood, and more immediately of making some cash in the here and now. And so they came up with their show, _Ed and Bill's Ghost Adventure_ , hosted by Ed and filmed by Bill. The few episodes of the show that were eventually published online were lackluster even by the standards of the genre, and were concerned with all the usual hotspots in New York City--the Morris Jumal Mansion, the Merchant's House Museum, whathaveyou (indeed, I googled it at the time of my investigation and found the a list that they were clearly working from, as it listed all the places they visited in the exact order).

But everything changed in the March of 2012 when Ed got an e-mail.

 _If either of you boys is interested in a_ real _haunting, I can show you something I_ know _you've never seen before. My contact information is below._

Both the yahoo mail this was sent from and the DM account listed had been deactivated by the time I was able to investigate it--never a good sign--and the latter was an app known for not saving any data--an even worse sign. All I can tell you is that according to their friends, whatever was in the messages passed between Ed and Bill and their mysterious contact excited both young men, but they adamantly refused to talk about it. Presumably their contact had sworn them to secrecy.

And that, for the time, was that. I cursed the gullibility of college kids too White and male to see the obvious signs that someone was luring them into a trap and moved on to other investigations.

Two years later, neighbors reported a fire at Delapore Manor Museum in Exham, South Carolina. The doors and windows had been barred from the inside, the first floor covered in accelerant, and the building burned down with the whole family inside. There were no survivors, though the eldest son of the family--Al Delapore, then nineteen years old--lived long enough to relay some truly disturbing final words.

A few days later, the local police received an e-mail from Al Delapore, apparently on some kind of dead man's switch. Attached was footage recorded by Bill Brinton; though he never appears on camera, he would eventually be identified by his voice. Ed, who did appear on camera, was eventually identified as a missing person from New York. Thankfully, one of the people I interviewed at the time remembered me and still had my contact information so that I might learn of this development, and through means I'd rather not disclose I eventually got my hands on the footage.

It begins with Ed and Al, who must have been seventeen at the time, looking at the camera. "Welcome back to Ed and Bill's Ghost Adventure, I am your host Ed Norrys, and our special guest today is Al Delapore, scion of the Delapore family of South Carolina. He's going to be showing us around his family's haunted museum. So what's the story, Al--may I call you 'Al'?"

"Please. And it's a long one. You have to understand, this thing isn't human and never was." When Al speaks, it's with an old money drawl and perfect elocution. "There are many theories about what it actually is. A demon summoned by some voodoo ritual gone horribly right. A nature spirit that has always inhabited this land but was corrupted by my family's evil. And then there's my personal theory, which...well, have you ever read Richard Dawkins' _The God Delusion_?"

"I'm afraid not," Ed said.

"Well, in it he posits that religion is a memetic parasite, feeding on rather than forwarding human culture. I don’t really buy that, but the concept of a memetic parasite in and of itself--something with physical form only in platonic space, that lives in our memories and perpetuates itself through our ideas like some sort of Jungian computer virus-- _that_ is something I could buy.

"There is also this New Age idea that ghosts are memories of events that get baked into a place. Well, if the memory of an event can be recorded like that, why not the memory of an _idea?_ And if so, a memetic parasite can then have a second vector of transmission. Perhaps this is why every living member of my family dreams of blood and the cruelty of our ancestors.

"What I'm saying is that I think this thing is literally made of evil. That every act of cruelty that took place here has been collected in the memories of the stone where it coalesced and congealed into this thing of purified, distilled evil."

The kid shrugged. He was a master dramatist, I'll give him that. "In any case, to understand this...thing...you need to understand our family history. Care to take a tour through the museum with me?"

"Of course," Ed said.

"Prior to 1789, my paternal lineage is that of French nobility. As far as I can tell, our reputation among the peasants was already...not great, but presumably they were less cruel than their descendants would become, if for no other reason than because peasants at least had _some_ legal standing, unlike slaves. When the Bastille was stormed on July 14th of that year, we saw the writing on the wall and fled to America with all the treasure we could loot, which we used to build this plantation."

He sighed and looked around at the room full of implements of torture balefully. "You have to understand as I go through all this that as far as I can tell there is nothing special about my ancestors. Certainly, we have always been...members in good standing of the community, at least until we opened this museum and started airing out the Southern gentry's dirty laundry. It makes me wonder, were we just unlucky...or are we all like this? We don't exactly publicly announce our curse, so how do I know that every aristocrat isn't in a similar situation?"

He shook his head. "Well, I can only tell you about my own bloodline.

"And though I just said there was nothing special about my ancestors, there might have been: they brought the tricks they used on peasants in Europe with them and blended them with what they learned from their neighbors here in South Carolina, and...went far afield in search of inspiration. But contemporary records would seem to indicate that none of their...quirks were seen as being particularly odd. And really, the worst stuff is the stuff that’s attested to elsewhere, on other plantations--if my hypothesis about this spirit’s origin is true, I have no reason to believe we’re alone in our plight, and someone _really_ ought to look into missing persons cases associated with old planter families and their properties."

"I'm sorry--'missing persons'?" Ed demanded.

Al seemed to compose himself instantly, and waved a hand dismissively. "We'll get to that. History first.

"You saw the cotton screw outside, I take it? That was primarily a means of packing and pressing cotton, but could be used to 'discipline' slaves; harness a mule or horse to one handle and a slave to the other, and spin. The more you screw ‘em, the faster, the less purchase their feet have on the ground, until eventually they’re essentially being centrifuged."

I will not be taking screenshots of the footage, as that's arguably evidence in a case that's never officially been closed, and the property has been burned down as I said, but I can provide other examples I've found online of the devices Al mentions on this tour. For instance, [this depiction](https://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/torture-cotton-screw.jpg) of a cotton screw being used as a torture device. Be warned before you click on the links that this is going to get graphic pretty quickly.

The first thing Al showed the ghost hunters is a [punishment collar](http://www.understandingslavery.com/images/stories/artefactAtlanticCrossing/1982_349_2.jpg) they had on display.

"Real nasty piece of work, this," he said. "A blend of ruthless practicality and pointless cruelty. Makes it hard to, say, move through cluttered, forested areas in an escape attempt, certainly, but it also makes it impossible to _lie down_. The thing is heavy, it impedes work, singles out the wearer of course, and might I add, chafes like nothing you can imagine. These collars could also be made of [wood](https://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/torture-wooden-boards.jpg), as well.

"[Thumbscrews](https://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/torture-thumb-screw.jpg) are usually associated with medieval Europe, and in truth my ancestors probably took theirs with them when they fled to America, but they were also widely used on slaves here. Who knows--maybe my ancestors started the idea?

"Whips were of course the most common form of torture found on a plantation; you were no doubt aware that slaves got whipped sometimes before coming here, as that's something that's so readily apparent even the American education system can't quite gloss over it, but did you know that the crack of a whip is a small sonic boom? Or that the strike of a whip could, and often did, slice strips of flesh from the victim’s body? For added cruelty, the open wounds left by the whip could be rubbed with salt. Or gravel."

I've found no copies of the pictures Al gestures at on the wall next to the coiled whip, but if you've ever seen the famous portrait of [Gordon the runaway slave](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JJm2UF4suYQ/UA07_iI_CnI/AAAAAAAALOg/YXRODxArN7U/s1600/whipping+scars.jpg), you get the general idea. "Those scars didn’t come from nowhere, you know.

"And then of course there was hanging. Not the sort done to _execute_ people mind. If you suspend a noose just right, so that the person in it has to stand on their tiptoes to breathe, and just leave them there for hours on end...well, it’s the sort of thing Vlad Țepeș would approve of.

"Oh, and if you really pissed your master off, to the point of wanting to make a lethal example of you, you could be hanged...from a hook, and [be suspended by the ribs](https://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/torture-hanging.jpg). There’s records somewhere in the Caribbean of a man who was suspended like that for three days before he died...of a beating he got when he insulted the guards.

"Now you might be thinking that if you were subject to these conditions, you’d kill yourself. Well, I have bad news; we had ways of preventing that. A common way for slaves to attempt suicide was to swallow caustic chemicals or try to clog their airways with dirt, which is where [these masks](https://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/torture-mask-1.jpg) come in handy. Can’t swallow anything dangerous if you can’t reach your mouth, can you?

"Not to mention the various forms of maiming and mutilation that could be done with a simple surgeons’ kit. Cut a foot off to prevent running away, a hand off to punish stealing, castrate a man...on the theory that a steer is more docile than a buck, I guess? My ancestors were into mutilation in a big way, largely because they were also practitioners of corpse medicine.

"Corpse medicine?" Ed asked.

"Medical cannibalism," Al clarified in an offhanded sort of way.

"You're joking," came Bill's voice from behind the camera. "Your family ate people?"

"Fed people to other people, technically."

"And you don't find this at all 'special'?"

"Honestly, it's harder to say than you might imagine. The Smithsonian recently published an article about the history of corpse medicine in Europe that I highly recommend." (He was likely referring to [this article](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/).) "The use of human remains as medicine was popular in humoral medicine, paracelsian medicine, and of course, homeopathy.

"Homeopathy!?" Ed demanded.

Al gave a sardonic half grin. "'Like cures like,' you know. So if you have a headache, sprinkle some powdered skull on your food, and boom, headache cured. And since the humoral system relied on the concept of you having four...well, humors, that could be balanced by bloodletting if you had too much blood, what do you imagine you’d have to do if the doctor told you you didn’t have _enough_ blood? Black bile’s not as easy to drain from a human system as blood is, after all. And old Paracelsus believed that spirits had healing properties--so what’s more associated with spirits than a dead body?

"Sounds like a good way to piss the spirit off, frankly," Ed said.

Al shrugged. "This isn't _my_ stupid idea; take it up with Paracelsus.

"It can also be argued that blood transfusion and organ donation are also forms of medical cannibalism--but I find that argument to be sophistic in the extreme, personally.

"Anyway, while corpse medicine was apparently actually more popular in New England than around here, it was at least well enough known that when old Walter Delapore...unmanned a dozen slaves in an attempt to cure his impotence, no one batted an eyelash.

"Ouch!" Bill blurted out in sympathy.

" _That’s_ the part that gets to you?" Al asked sardonically.

"Anyway, while there’s other torture devices here--we haven’t even gotten to the brands yet--you get the idea. My ancestors had more tools up their sleeves than physical torture, though. They also engaged in psychological warfare and social conditioning to break the wills of their slaves. Perhaps you’ve heard of masters cherry-picking the most seemingly pro-slavery bible passages for their slaves to hear, but it’s more than that and, in my ancestors’ case at least, more...ecumenical.

"Slaves often sought solace in more grassroots sorts of religions, like voodoo, and my ancestors sought to steal that solace from them--so we took on the trappings of the bokor and the caplata, voodoo's priests and priestesses of evil."

"Is that not unique?" Ed asked.

Al shrugged. "I sincerely doubt it. How many times have you read something set in the antebellum South and see a character, without any explanation for how he knew how to do that and with it never being referenced again, make a voodoo sign of some description at some slaves in order to make sure they do as they’re told? And I can’t deny the... _utility_ of convincing slaves you have magic powers and that they can’t escape you, even in death. And as corpse medicine shows us, the people of the past were clearly getting up to _a lot_ that they didn’t bother to write down for posterity.

"And then there’s the secret societies. The thing a lot of people don’t understand is that things like the Brimstone club were mainly ways for rich idiots to find people they had interests in common with before the invention of the internet, at which point they’d have orgies or pretend to worship the devil or some such nonsense. I know for a fact that my ancestors belonged to all sorts of secret societies built around the practice and study of evil voodoo rites, and it'd hardly surprise me if this was true of the entirety of the antebellum South's high society.

"Not that I think they _believed_ it, mind. But my ancestors at least did seek out every scrap of information about what a bokor was supposed to be, and the logic behind it, and clearly had a passion for it...it’s like, you know how basically every relevant scientist everywhere tells us that FTL is impossible and there are no humanoid aliens and yet we watch _Star Trek_ and see both and don’t have our suspension of disbelief stretched? I think my ancestors 'believed' in voodoo in the same sense that a modern Trekkie 'believes' in _Star Trek_. Like, you can't be that passionate about something and that steeped in it without it seeping into you, and even atheists will pray in foxholes, just on account of God being prominent in the culture that molded them, you know? And I know they were passionate because according to...independent research that I've done, I am a fully qualified bokor."

"Wait; did your parents _teach_ you this?"

"Not my parents, no. This thing speaks to us in our dreams, remember. But we'll get to that."

"I see," Ed said. "...So is there, like, a voodoo wing of the museum?"

"No. As I said, one of our hypotheses is that that crap was real enough for us to have accidentally summoned a demon--if so, spreading it about would be irresponsible. Granted, a lot of what we did isn’t... _replicable_ , this side of robbing a graveyard, and sometimes even then, but still. Besides, we feel that would rather distract from the point of the museum to focus on such...salacious details.

"Well, corpse medicine fell out of favor eventually--I'm not actually sure when--but by that point patent medicine was on the scene, so we just stopped telling people what was in our tinctures."

"Ew," Ed said.

"Yeah.

"The Civil War happened and slavery 'ended,'" Al's voice dripped with sarcasm as he did the finger quotes, "but through various sharecropping and 'apprenticeship' scams, as well as just blatantly ignoring the law, nothing much changed, though we had to be more covert than we had been before; our victims theoretically had rights now, and it would have been uncouth to force the local sheriffs to take notice of what we were doing, after all. In the twentieth century the Great Migration happened and our plantation was basically depopulated when all the not-legally-slaves left. That and the end of patent medicines as a thing meant that our reign of terror had ended."

Al licked his lips. Up to this point he was displaying the sort of almost _blase_ anger of someone long resigned to the existence of evils he could do nothing about, sprinkled with the occasional bit of sadistic delight in the discomfort of others being made aware of it for the first time. His whole bearing seemed to change as he switched gears to an issue that was affecting him personally. The confident young man was gone, and someone far more timid had taken his place. "That's when it made itself known," he said quietly.

"We don’t dare give it a name." He was trembling now. "All the time we had lived here, it had been with us...feeding on the suffering we caused. It had been content to let us do our thing, as long as we fed it unwittingly, but now that that was over, it was furious, and it was _hungry_. It hungers."

His voice dropped to a whisper. "To this day, it hungers."

Suddenly Al stiffened as though struck, and then visibly deflated.

"Are you okay?" Ed asked.

"No, because it knows you're here. It knows what I was trying to do. I'm sorry. Follow me."

Confused, the two men do so.

"How do you know it knows?" Ed asked.

"Because it's _inside_ us. My entire cursed bloodline.

"There’s no such thing as a good slave owner, Mr. Norrys. Trust me on this. Even if you never whip your slaves or do any of the absolutely horrid things I've shown you here, and treat them with what you think is kindness, you can't be a good slave owner. It’s impossible by definition, because you're already doing the worst thing of all: owning them. Making them into something less than fully human. Less than dignified."

Ed appeared to be taken aback by this apparent non sequitur. "Um...."

They entered a kitchen area.

"I know what it is to be someone--some _thing’s_ property. To know you’re less than human. To be forced to do horrible, unconscionable things against your own volition. And it...what can I say? It’s bad, Mr. Norrys.

"One day I’ll escape, or kill it, or die, or let the world know what’s going on here...but that day’s not today, apparently.

Al pulled a knife from a wooden block, and began examining it like a finely-crafted sword. Ed, finally, began to be visibly scared.

"For what it’s worth, I’m deeply sorry about this. But the master demands to be fed."

At this point there is brief static and the video ends. I have no idea how Al apparently managed to subdue two grown men. Perhaps he wasn't alone in the museum.

The police suggest that the video was an elaborate prank, which I realize makes them sound completely incompetent, but to be fair all three of the people involved in this were trained dramatists (Al being a lead in many high school plays) and it's easy to imagine a situation where they come up with this mini-movie to drum up interest in Ed and Bill's show and the Delapore museum at the same time, something happens to Ed and Bill on their way home, and the Delapore family sits on the tapes either because releasing them would be bad taste or to avoid falsely incriminating themselves in a real disappearance. And the lands were thoroughly searched with no signs of any human remains less than a century old being found, according to what information they were willing to give out.

However, such concerns could easily have been explained away by the Delapore family, and it doesn't explain the nature of Bill and Ed's communications with their contact (whom, may I remind you, boasted of a _real_ haunting in an email that was presumably never meant to be seen by the public). Whoever it was was skilled at luring people to them in ways that left no trace, knew exactly who to target and how, and if that was Al it raises all sorts of disturbing questions. I am further disturbed by Al's claim of being "a fully qualified bokor"; according to a lot of different lore from a lot of different places, one has to commit a cardinal sin of some description to be blessed with dark powers.

It's also odd for there to be no human remains less than a century old on the property when that is the location of the Delapore plot, which they have allegedly been using.

As for what I think, I think that Al Delapore's free will was severely limited. When inviting ghost hunters to his family's museum to get the word out about what was happening there, he had to do it as though he was luring them there to be killed, as that was how he justified the action to his master, and then when it noticed they were there he had to go through with it. I also think he eventually found a way to end it, with the fire two years later.

It would explain his dying words, at least:

"I die free."

**Author's Note:**

> This story was [ported](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/9mv49w/it_hungers/) from r/nosleep, but as you can plainly see if you click on that link, it has been modified greatly.
> 
> For instance, the addition of a narrator. The investigator allows me to tie this into a series of sorts I've been kicking around, but also gives me permission to go beyond the transcript and make what's going on clearer, as people on reddit seemed to forget by the end that the first thing we learned was that this kid and his family are dead, not to mention giving me an excuse to make the reading more emotional than a strict transcript of a video has any right being.
> 
> I changed the names because "Dexter Ward" and "Joe Curwen" makes it seem like I'm making shout-outs to H.P. Lovecraft, and that's not what this is. This is a whole plot reference and a direct challenge to _The Rats in the Walls_ , which while being one of his best works is also very racist. (Not my platonic kismesis' most racist work by any stretch of the imagination, but even ignoring That Fucking Cat we are asked to root for unrepentant slave owners.) And I changed Adrien to Al because I figured I might as well commit to the bit.
> 
> As to why I changed the title, I'd used the wrong title when posting it to reddit. This is actually the title it was always meant to have, and the original on alternatehistory.com has this title, but I forgot when I ported it to reddit and that has annoyed me ever since.


End file.
